Edmonton JCC Building Committee Update

(HaKol, January 2018) – The Edmonton JCC Building Committee, chaired by Clive Oshry, has been continuing to work on planning a new JCC for the Talmud Torah Site.

The work of the Federation JCC Negotiating Committee continues. A meeting was held with representatives from the Talmud Torah Board, Federation and the Edmonton Public School Board on December 5th at the Talmud Torah school to help to move forward. The meeting was very productive.

Federation has engaged Stantec, an architecture/design firm to work with both Federation and Talmud Torah to create development permit-ready drawings. The purpose of the drawings is to help fine tune what is possible on the potential Talmud Torah school site, what synergies and limitations exist, and an estimate of construction costs. These drawings will serve as a guide to focus the discussion and negotiations moving forward. Once these drawings are prepared, both the Federation JCC Building Committee and Talmud Torah will have a common frame of reference to work with in order to move forward with negotiations.

The meeting with the various groups helped to determine what all parties want from the new structure, and where it and the parking will sit on the site, which will help establish structure and add momentum to the negotiating process.

Over the summer, research was done into zoning and bylaw issues and the Joint-use Agreement currently in place governing the land around Talmud Torah, which is subject to an agreement involving the City of Edmonton, the Edmonton Public School Board, the Catholic School Board and Talmud Torah Society. Meetings between the Talmud Torah Society and EPSB were held over the summer to discuss this, as well as other issues.

Currently, there is a negotiating committee set up consisting of members of the TT Society and Federation, as well as representatives from EPSB. They plan to meet over the next few months with Stantec in order to come to an agreement regarding resolution of the issues concerning what the building will look like, where it will be situated on the site, what will be inside the building, how much it will cost, and what the resulting implications will be of the zoning, bylaws and Joint-Use agreement.

This is a long process, and we appreciate, and thank you for your patience as we deal with the complexities of building a community building.

(This article was previously published in the January 2018 edition of HaKol – a publication of the Edmonton Jewish Federation).

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